Creating a tombstone and more trivia

RIVER BENDER - September, 2007

 

Create your own tombstone (Thanks to Alice Long)

Remember Mark Twain's remark about the news of his death being exaggerated. Well you can exaggerate yours too by creating a photo of a tombstone with your epitaph on it by going to Tombstone Generator at http://www.jjchandler.com/tombstone/. Or if you prefer an older weathered tombstone try www.tiny.cc/ChK1X. The tombstone photo worked great for me as a joke I sent to my brother, a retired airline pilot, after he heard that the Air Line Pilots Association's (ALPA) magazine had him listed as deceased.

Shorten long URLS

Don't you hate long web page addresses (URLs) like http://www.autowitch.org/?q=node%2F916&line1=Online&line2=Generators&line3=%40+Blogspot.com, especially in a newspaper article like this where you can't copy/paste it? Microsoft web page URLs are terribly long. Well, here's a web page called Tiny URL that shortens your URL for free so it will still work: http://www.tiny.cc/. For example, the above long URL converted to www.tiny.cc/ChK1X. If you send out long URLs by e-mail often put a Tiny URL icon on your desktop so it's handy for conversion. How do you do put an icon on your desktop? When the web page is displayed go to File/Send/Shortcut to Desktop.

Are you getting spammed?

Of course you are, unless you changed your e-mail address recently and even then it's only a matter of time before spammers find you. How do they do that? Lots of ways but one quick way is if your e-mail address is on a web page. They say it's only a matter of hours before spammers will harvest it using spider software that roams the web. What can you do? Type your e-mail address in Google and see if it shows up. If a web page is mentioned open the page and search for your address. If you don't find it go to View/Source and search the html code. If you still don't find it then it may have been there at one time but was since removed so you're OK. If you do find it, contact the webmaster for the web page and have him either remove it, munge it or encode it so it's protected. But it's probably too late.

Print a listing of all the folders on your hard drive. (Thanks to Larry Poos answering Rudy Ramcke's question on NBCUG mail.
1. Click Start/Run
2. Type cmd
3. Click OK
4. Type: cd c:\
5. Press Enter key
6. Type: dir/b/s/ogne >c:\mydirlist.txt
7. Press Enter key
8. Wait - it takes a couple minutes before the C prompt reappears
9. Close Command window
10. Go to My Computer and C: drive
11. Locate the file mydirlist.txt that was created containing all your folders, which you can now search, edit or print out.
12. If you have another hard drive simply type the letter+colon in step 4, such as F: (without the cd). Mydirlist.txt will then be placed in the F: drive if you change c: to f: in step 6.

All computer articles by Dave Wallace since 1998 are at http://always-online.com/dave/dwindex.htm.